Water madness

A civilization's gullibility, I suspect, can be measured by rising sales of bottled water.

Not that there's anything wrong with bottled water -- except, perhaps, its exorbitant cost and its dubious origins.

Spring water, melting glaciers and mountain streams may suggest that water bottled at any of those sources is, in some mysterious way, better and healthier.

Springs? Glaciers? Streams? Where, exactly, do you think those herds of elk go to the bathroom?

Water has been put in containers since the early Roman era. Water-based spas in the mid-19th century made some waters famous.

In the Ozark hills over yonder where I grew up, the oldest homesteads are close to water: rivers, spring-fed creeks and springs. But as those hills became more populated, folks had to use their ingenuity to ensure a good supply of water.

Ponds were built for livestock. Cisterns were dug to catch rainwater. Shallow wells supplied hand-operated pumps. And deep wells became possible with the arrival of electricity and submersible pumps.

In my lifetime, I have experienced all of these water sources.

My paternal grandmother lived the last years of her life in a small house on a piece of land squeezed between a mountain and a spring-fed stream in the Ozarks. The house had no running water.

When I was 8 or 9 years old, my mother and I were visiting my grandmother when she handed me a bucket and sent me to the spring. I had never been to the spring, but she told me to stay on the path and I wouldn't miss it.

A couple of years ago my wife and I took one of our sons to that house, which is falling down now. I wanted a memento of a woman who died when I was 10 but who provided me with some vivid memories. We searched for the spring. The path was gone. Perhaps my childhood memories misjudged the distance, but we couldn't find the gushing water that I remember so well.

We left with some moss-covered rocks my grandmother had arranged near the house to outline a bed of flowers she had planted. Those rocks are featured in my fountain folly on our patio.

At our farmhouse on Killough Valley, we had no electricity in the early 1950s and relied on a cistern near the back porch. It stored rainwater that ran off the roof of the house into gutters and then into the cistern. Whenever it rained, we had to run outside and divert the first few minutes of water, presuming that the rain would somehow cleanse the roof. Then the water would be diverted into the cistern to be pulled up by a bucket attached to a rope-and-pulley system.

The buckets of cistern water sat on a shelf on the back porch. A common dipper was used for drinking. Water was ladled into a kettle to be heated for dishwashing. On Saturday morning, a large kettle was of cistern water was heated over an outdoor fire for doing laundry.

When electricity came in 1953, one of the first upgrades at the farm was a deep well that produced water full of lime and goodness knows what else, giving the water a certain sweetness.

The first bottled water I ever saw was in the Kansas City area in the 1960s. The label plainly stated that the water came from the Kansas City municipal water system, which treated water from the Missouri River.

Today, many European restaurants that cater to tourists supply bottled water for every meal and add the cost to your bill. The marketing appeals to Americans who are afraid to drink the local water and will pay through the nose for the bottled version that's very likely from the same source. Locals at the same restaurants avoid the water dilemma intelligently. They drink the local wine.

I am not trying to make a case against water in plastic bottles. I'm simply trying to understand why it's such a fad. An expensive one at that.

And don't get me started on imported bottled water.

R. Joe Sullivan is the editor of the Southeast Missourian.